Any SCQF 7 module in literature, film, photography, cultural studies, sociology or psychology.

We have come to imagine the United States of America as central to Western power, capitalism and cultural imperialism. Yet some notable American writers of the past century rebelled against many of the hegemonic norms central to a traditional reading of American society and identity; indeed, they attempted to subvert the American Dream itself.

On this module you will examine the challenges to convention, capitalism, white power, and established morality in modern American writing throughout the course of the twentieth century. You will analyse representative short stories in twentieth-century American writing, particularly looking at the influence of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio on subsequent American and world literature; you will study American Modernism in the shape of Gertrude Stein’s work, and exilic American writing of the 1930s, focussing on the controversial sexual politics of Henry Miller; you will look broadly at the Harlem Renaissance, especially in the work of Zora Neale Hurston; you will examine the Southern Gothic in Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café; you will study the influential Beat movement through the lens of Jack Kerouac’s highly popular novel On the Road; and the module will conclude with you reading Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho as modern American political satire.

LO1: you will articulate a well-argued understanding of the diverse nature of twentieth-century American writing
LO2: you will understand modern American writing in its historical and cultural contexts
LO3: you will undertake critical analysis of particular texts relating to America in their cultural, theoretical, national and international contexts
LO4: you will explain the importance of the concept of the outlaw in modern American writing
LO5: you will evaluate the formal development of writing in America from modernism to postmodernism